ADAM NICHOLS – PROFESSOR EMERITUS – UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
I’m a Professor Emeritus with the University of Maryland. I taught for the university for nearly four decades: ten years with their European division in England, Scotland, Iceland, and Germany; another ten years downrange on military installations (the University of Maryland has a contract with the US military to provide education for active duty troops) in Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, and Afghanistan; and the rest stateside. I’ve also lived and worked in Norway, Australia, China, and Canada. I now live in the US.
Back in 2016, I collaborated with an Icelandic colleague of mine, Karl Smári Hreinsson, on an English translation of a little known but altogether fascinating series of seventeenth century Icelandic texts. That English translation was published by the Catholic University of America Press under the title The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson: the Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627.
My interest in (and research about) Barbary corsairs goes far beyond just their Icelandic exploits, though, and this Corsairs & Captives blog focuses on all sorts of aspects related to Barbary corsairs—and on the men, women, and children who were their captives.
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Towards the end of 2024, I had a new book come out: Corsairs & Captives: Narratives from the Age of the Barbary Pirates.
Corsairs & Captives presents a collection of narratives, all based directly on primary-source documents, several of which are translated into English for the first time. They include biographies of four renegade corsair captains (Europeans who converted to Islam and became corsairs), descriptions of sea battles by those who were there, accounts of ransomed captives, the report of a French Trinitarian friar who led a ransoming expedition to Algiers, even the transcript of a trial held by the Canary Islands chapter of the (in)famous Spanish Inquisition.
You can find more details about this book, and a link to the Amazon listing, in the Published Books section of this blog.
There’s also a link to the Amazon listing for the book at the bottom of each post in this blog.
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Over the past few years, Karl Smári Hreinsson and I completed four more books devoted to the Barbary corsair raids on Iceland in 1627.
The first book, titled Northern Captives: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Grindavík in1627 (published in 2020), tells the story of the raid by corsairs from Salé on southwest Iceland. It details the events of the attack itself and then follows the Icelandic captives to Salé, where they were sold into slavery.
The second book, titled Stolen Lives: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Heimaey in1627 (published in 2021), tells the story of the raid by corsairs from Algiers on Heimaey, one of the the Westman Islands located off Iceland’s south coast. It details the events of the attack on the island and then follows the Icelandic captives to Algiers, where they too were sold into slavery.
The third book, titled Enslaved: The Story of the Barbary Corsair raid on East Iceland in 1627 (published in 2022), tells the story of the raid by the same corsairs from Algiers on the East Fjords, located in southeastern Iceland. It details the events of the attack and then follows the Icelandic captives to Algiers, where they were sold into slavery along with the Heimaey islanders.
The fourth book, titled Turbulent Times: Skálholt and the Barbary Corsair Raids on Iceland in 1627 (published in 2023), explores for the first time the role played by Skálholt, the seat of the Bishops of South Iceland, and Skálholtsskóli (Skálholt’s school) in the creation of the Icelandic accounts of the corsair raids of 1627. It presents a description of Skálholt and the times in which it existed as well as the accounts themselves, translated from the original seventeenth century Icelandic.
You can find links to the Amazon listings for all these books in the Published Books section of this blog.
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Karl and I have also had a number of our books translated: into Greek, Italian, and Dutch.
You can find details about, and links to, these translations in the Published Books section of this blog.
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Also (rather interestingly) there is a YouTube video uploaded by an organization known as Voices of the Past. They post videos in which they read aloud texts that describe important events of the past.
The video (which is eighteen minutes long) is titled
Enslaved Icelander Describes Horror of Barbary Pirate Raid (1627) – Diary of Ólafur Egilsson
It consists of excerpts from the revised edition of The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson that are read aloud, accompanied by a series of images. At last check, this video had 3.5 million views. It was first posted in 2022.
Here’s a link:
Enslaved Icelander Describes Horror of Barbary Pirate Raid
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Also, while we’re dealing with interesting things…
NTR (Netherlands Television & Radio) created a four-part documentary on Jan Janszoon van Haarlem, aka Murad Reis, the Barbary corsair captain from Salé (on the Atlantic coast of Morocco) who led the raids on southwest Iceland in the summer of 1627. The documentary was titled Jan Janszoon: Piraat van de Wereld (Jan Janszoon: Pirate of the World) and first aired in the Netherlands in February, 2024.
I was interviewed (in English) for this documentary as a subject matter expert (I’m currently working on a full-length biography of Jan Janszoon).
Jan Janszoon: Piraat van de Wereld is now available to view on YouTube (with Arabic subtitles). Most of it is in Dutch, of course, but there are sizeable portions in English: the interviews with me (and also with my Icelandic colleague, Karl Smári Hreinsson), plus interviews with Irish and American subject matter experts.
It’s all quite fascinating.
All four episodes of Jan Janszoon: Piraat van de Wereld can be accessed on YouTube. Here are the links:
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View my website:
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